The present invention concerns a unit for separating a pre-cut substrate into a plurality of separate sub-substrates. The separator unit is usable notably when positioned downstream of a cutting unit in a packaging production machine.
A packaging production machine is designed for the fabrication of boxes that form packaging after folding and gluing. In this machine, an initial continuous plane substrate, such as a plane web of cardboard, is unwound and is printed by a print unit, itself constituted of sub-units in the form of printing units. The web is then transferred into a cutting unit. After cutting, the substrates or blanks obtained have waste areas that are eliminated in a waste stripping unit.
A substrate or blank is composed of a plurality of sub-substrates or boxes. Depending on the type of cutting unit used, for example with a diecutting platen, the boxes are attached to each other by nicks. The nicks join two edges of a cutting line between two boxes and constitute bridges of the same material as the boxes and the blanks. With rotary die-cutting the boxes are juxtaposed.
The substrates or blanks are then separated in a separator unit or separator to obtain individual sub-substrates or boxes. This unit is designed to move the boxes transversely away from each other and/or if necessary to break the nicks, by conveying each of the boxes along a divergent trajectory. This trajectory is obtained by a fan-shaped orientation, i.e. one with divergent directions, of the conveyor ramps designed to convey the blanks from the outlet of the cutting unit to the outlet of the separator unit.
Because of this, the precut blanks leaving the cutting unit along a longitudinal series of adjacent parallel lines are reoriented by means of the conveyor ramps along a series of laterally spaced parallel lines so that two laterally adjacent boxes are no longer joined together. The individual boxes are then routed to a stacking unit for subsequent folding and gluing.
The ramps must be disposed on either side of a median longitudinal line of the blank. The number of ramps, the angle and the distance between the ramps in a plane corresponding to that of the blanks are chosen to enable optimum separation as a function of the layout, i.e. the disposition, of the boxes on the blank. The operator must quickly and simply modify the orientation and the position of the conveyor ramps for each new job. The operator must intervene in the centre center of the machine to adjust the ramps, which is not very ergonomic.